Posts Tagged ‘technology’

With our upcoming Sage 300 ERP 2014 version we will be integrated with Sage Intelligence Reporting 7.4. Within our product this will also be labeled as version 2014. This is a fairly major upgrade to the Sage Intelligence package and definitely worth a look. There have been a great many feature, usability and performance enhancements throughout the product.

This product is integrated to many sister Sage ERP packages and this is where Sage is investing in improving Excel based reporting. For ERP a big usage of this is for Financial Reporting, but don’t forget this is a useful tools for many other applications like Sales Analysis.

Financial Reporting

Many of our Sage sister products used Microsoft FRX as their financial reporter. This product has now been discontinued by Microsoft. To provide a replacement we spent quite a bit of time adding features contained in FRX into Sage Intelligence. Sage 300 never used FRX, but we now benefit from all this work with better Financial Reporting from Sage Intelligence.

For Sage 300 ERP installed on-premise, it still includes the Financial Reporter bundled with General Ledger. This F/R is still there and supported. We just added support for Excel 2013 which was a major job due to the changes in Excel from a multiple document interface (MDI) to a single document interface (SDI) along with Excel now having data execution protection (DEP) turned on. We understand that people have invested a lot in developing many powerful reports with this technology and are quite happy with how it works.

For the Sage 300 Online product we have removed this Financial Reporter and are only hosting Sage Intelligence for Financial Reporting. With this cloud offering we are looking to the future. With version 1.0 of this product we are running the regular desktop version of Excel to work with Sage Intelligence. But this isn’t really what we wanted. As a cloud offering we wanted to integrate to the cloud version of Excel, namely the browser based Excel 365 version. However the API for this product isn’t sufficient yet to do sophisticated Financial Reporting. Once Excel 365 develops sufficient power, we will be integrating Sage Intelligence to this and allow cloud based use of Office 365. By using Sage Intelligence it means that when we switch from the local installation of Excel to using the cloud version, all your report will continue to work and won’t need to be re-written. For the Sage 300 built-in Financial Reporter it will only continue to work with the local installed version of Excel. As a result of this besides adding features needed for FRX users, we have also added functionality to Sage Intelligence to make it more comparable to the built in Financial Reporter.

Performance

We now load all the data into memory at the beginning and then do all reporting from this in-memory database. This way as you change reporting options and interact with the report, you get far better performance than before. No more re-reading things from the database as you go along.

Excel Support

Sage Intelligence 7.4 now supports running Excel 2013 both 32 and 64 bits. For Sage 300 ERP the built-in F/R supports Excel 2013 but only running in 32 bit. If you absolutely need 64 Bits then give this solution a look. However MS does install 32 bits by default now for Excel 2013 due to all the compatibility problems with the 64 bit version (it isn’t only us). Similarly Sage Intelligence also no uses .Net framework 4 which is better supported and avoids installing old versions of the .Net runtime.

Screenshots

Let’s look at a few of the new things in the product. First we’ve modernize the toolbar in the Report Manager to the Office ribbon style. We’ve also fixed up the wording and hints to make this a bit easier to use.

As part of providing an out of the box Financial Reporting solution for Sage 300 ERP, we’ve added a number of sample reports that match the Financial Reports bundled with our built in F/R. Below is he home page for the Financial Ratio report:

And then the actual report. Note that there are a few more ratios here than in the built-in report along with graphs and such.

For the Balance Statement and Income Statement reports each three are incorporated into one Sage Intelligence report, each on a separate tab. One of the income statements is shown below.

The new Report Designer boasts a fresh new User Interface to supplement a powerful generation engine utilizing the Report Designer In-Memory technology allowing for improved performance and usability. This tool makes it very easy to create new powerful Financial Reports without having to edit every Excel cell by hand. Automated layout generation for a single company:

Plus screens to specify your account ranges and labels:

Summary

Sage 300 ERP 2014 will be bundled with Sage Intelligence 2014 which is version Sage Alchemex Intelligence 7.4. This is a fairly major release which greatly increases the power of Sage Intelligence as a Financial Reporter. It adds many features to be comparable to both FRX and to the built-in F/R from General Ledger. This version supports Excel 2013, including the 64 bit version and this is the product that we will be adding cloud based Excel 365 support to.

In a previous posting I talked about some improvements to the look of the Sage 300 ERP Desktop, in this article I’ll be looking at a number of improvements we’ve made in our document entry screens. The last major screen refresh was when we re-wrote our screens from CA-Realizer to VB6 for version 5.0A. This was a major technology upgrade that enabled much of the new technologies in our screens. This allowed them to be customizable and enabled things like screen resizing. Back then we designed the screens for a maximum display resolution of 800×600 and designed the screens accordingly. Since then over several versions we’ve added many new features and this has tended to clutter up the screens.

With this version, we aren’t performing a major technology refresh but we are revisiting many of the screen design decisions made back in the 5.0A days and making small but significant changes to make the screens look more modern. We don’t want to disrupt current customers with this release, we want the screens to still be familiar and we want people to work the way they have always worked. As a result we haven’t rearranged fields or moved fields around. Everything should be where you remember it, just laid out a bit better using some extra space.

First we’ll look at the new O/E Order Entry Screen so we can refer to it as we go through the various changes.

New Minimum Resolution

When we released 5.0A 800×600 was a pretty good super-VGA resolution that could be handled by most good laptop and desktop computers. Now it’s pretty easy to get multiple banks of 27 inch monitors with terrific resolution. If you want to spend a lot of money you can even get 4K resolution. However we now live in a world with quite small ultra-notebooks as well as a plethora of tablet computers. So we can’t greatly change our minimum resolution, but we can at least increase it to 1024×768.

This then gives us a bit of room to unpack fields, to get better column alignment and to add a bit of white space back to the forms. Some fields where quite squished in, and now we can get back to everything having a bit of room to breathe. This is then much easier on the eyes and makes using the screen a bit easier on the concentration.

New Graphics

If you look at the form, you might notice that we’ve updated most of the little bitmaps, for instance, to create a new record or to drill down to further information. Some of the graphics are a little larger than they used to be, taking advantage of the extra screen real estate. They are also a little more modern looking with the current prevailing styles. Notice that everything is a bit flatter looking as this is the trend.

Required Fields

We’ve added an asterisk to all the required fields. You can see this on the Order Entry screen next to the Customer Number along with a little legend over on the right. This has been a long time requested feature for the product. Order Entry doesn’t have many required fields, but some other functions have quite a few. These just give you a visual cue of which fields to enter, so you can avoid annoying error messages when you save or post a document.

Notes for Developers

All of these features are “opt-in”. If you don’t do anything to your screens, they will look and behave exactly as before. We don’t want to effect screens generically, since if we just put in the new graphics, they could cause fields on screens to overlap and such. Besides remaining compatible with third parties, we also need to remain compatible with older versions of our applications for before they are activated to the new version. Some of the old graphics are quite small and didn’t want to limit ourselves to those sizes since it restricted the graphics designers too much.

Of course resizing the form is up to you and just done in VB. I suspect many ISVs have already adopted larger screen sizes, so this may not be such a big deal.

For the other items they are all options in the field edit control that must be turned on. Below is the new FEC configuration dialog for the customer number field in Order Entry:

Note the checkboxes for “Load Modernized Icon” and “Required Fields” that have been added to allow you to enable these features.

Summary

With each release of Sage 300 ERP we are striving to take steps to improve the look and usability of the product. Since the 2014 version isn’t a major technology release we want make sure the changes aren’t disruptive. As a result we’ve analyzed a number of improvements that are useful, but won’t cause any retraining burden on our customers. Combined with the changes to the Desktop, these changes give the product a fresher look. Then we’ll keep on adding a few improvements of this nature in each product update and release.

Earlier this year Sage CRM 7.2 was released for standalone CRM customers. We have competed the Sage 300 ERP integration in conjunction with the Service Pack 1 release of Sage CRM 7.2. We have now released the Sage 300 ERP 2012 integration for Sage CRM 7.2 and this is the integration that will be included in the forthcoming Sage 300 ERP 2014 release.

Generally customers find that combining Sage CRM as a front office solution to Sage 300 ERP as the back office solution creates a much more powerful combined system than having separate ERP and CRMs. The level of automation, reporting and customer connectedness is greatly increased across the organization. As such introducing a new version of CRM can provide many immediate benefits for companies and this blog is looking at some of the things that are new in this version. We find that customers running both of these Sage products together have much higher net promoter scores than customers running non-integrated systems.

Social CRM

Historically CRM programs managed communications with customers and other business contacts by managing e-mails and phone calls. CRM had all the basic contact information, integrations to help automate these processes like creating e-mails and automatically recording the information in CRM. Auto-dialing phones and logging that you called and letting you fill in some comments. Setting reminders and schedules for performing these tasks.

However, how we are communicating with our business contacts is changing. Many people are using e-mail and voice phones much less than they used to. I ignore most incoming calls from unknown callers because they are usually cold sales calls or scams (like you have just won a cruise vacation). E-mail is getting much noisier with spam and other junk, causing more important e-mails to just get lost. It’s been found that recent high school graduates actually have quite an aversion to actually talking on a phone and don’t use e-mail much.

Now there are many more communication channels. Many people now communicate via various social websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Yammer and Twitter. Many calls are made via services like Skype and there are people texting more than ever and even using systems like BBM.

So if we want to get a complete comprehensive picture of all our communications with a customer, we need to see all of these in CRM as well. We added LinkedIn and Twitter connectors to Sage CRM last version and with this version we have added Facebook integration.

With this Facebook integration you can bring Facebook information right inside Sage CRM to better understand your customer. You can associate Facebook pictures and profiles with prospects. Generally this is an avenue to get a more complete picture of your customer, or potential customer’s business.

Getting good leads is usually a big problem for companies. Chances are that for a given customer, his contacts will be related in some way and perhaps offer good prospects to market to. If you do get a response from one of a customer’s contacts then you can use the original customer as a reference to help make the sale, or act as an introduction to get you in the door.

Social Media stores terabytes and terabytes of information on business’s and people. Being able to effectively mine all this information is going to be a huge competitive advantage in the future.

Another social feature added to Sage CRM 7.2 is Yammer integration. Yammer is a social network for collaboration within a company. With this integration your sales teams can collaborate and share information using Yammer from Sage CRM.

Mobile CRM

People don’t necessarily spend their entire day sitting at their desk behind a computer. They work from home, they travel on business trips and visit customers face to face. You CRM system contains tons of useful information that will help you do your job better if accessible in these situations. Over the past couple of versions and further with this new version, we‘ve been adding mobile features to Sage CRM to make it easier to access from mobile devices.

Sage CRM is a web application and with the previous version we enhanced to work with all popular browsers. This then allowed mobile users (which usually have Safari or Chrome) to browse the Sage CRM screens. Perhaps this works a bit better for tablets, but tends to be a bit of a pain on an iPhone.

As a result we’ve been adding native device apps to complement the web interface to Sage CRM. Plus we’ve been working on improving the web interface so it will work much better on table devices like the iPad.

As we move forwards we will be providing more and more functionality on more and more mobile devices so you can instantly get any information you need instantly. Down the road you might be wearing your Google glasses and when you say the customer’s name, all the information on that customer will be right there in your view to reference.

Reporting

With this version of Sage CRM we’ve improved the reporting capabilities. A new HTML5 based charting library has been added, so you don’t need Adobe Flash for charts anymore. You can clone reports to get started with a customization. There are more chart types with more configurable settings. There are new security settings so you can better control who can see what.

Customization

Sage CRM 7.2 adds more codeless customization capability where you can design more powerful screens right in the product without writing code. Sage CRM also doesn’t use frames to hold custom screens anymore. This will affect some ASP based customizations, but generally leads to better ability to control your own web pages (especially the CSS).

Integration

The main change to the Sage 300 ERP integration was changing Quotes to Orders to work in the new frameless Sage CRM web pages. Most other changes have already been released in service packs or hotfixes for Sage 300 ERP 2012, so if you are fully current you won’t see much different. But if you are coming from an older version, you should see a number of improvements.

Summary

Sage CRM 7.2 integrated with Sage 300 ERP make for a powerful front/back office solution. This release is definitely worth checking out especially for the mobility and social features.

For this article, I’m going to be looking at our new Sage Mobile Sales application. This application has two parts, an iPad native application for taking sales and a web site for managing inventory, customers and sales people.

This application enables sales people to show customers products right from a catalog on their iPad, they can review and edit customer information, they can create a quote and have it e-mailed to the customer, they can check product availability and they can enter an order and accept immediate payment.

Generally this application is best for salespeople working directly with clients to create a quote or order. It makes getting information on the items being sold easy as well as allows you to easily create the order.

The diagram below shows the mobile application interfaced to the Sage Data Cloud and the Sage Data Cloud connected to the on-premise ERP system to synchronize data. You can take credit card payments directly from the iPad or take orders on account. If you take the order on account then you can use the Sage Billing and Payments application to collect the money which is also shown connected to the Sage Data Cloud.

The iPad Application

The sales people will install this native iPad application onto their iPad from the Apple store. You can see the Apple store entry here. This application fully uses the capabilities of the iPad to make life as easy as possible for the sales people. Below is a screen shot of the customer list:

If you tap any of these customers then you will get more detailed information on that customer:

This includes their contact information as well as giving you their sales history.

Similarly you can get a list of inventory items and if you tap them you get detailed information on the item for sale:

Notice you see the price and the quantity available. You also get a number of photos of the item. You can immediately add it to a quote. You also see links to similar items.

The application is written in Objective-C and developed using Apple’s XCode integrated environment. Note that this application requires at least iOS 6, which means you need at least an iPad 2. If you need to be truly mobile, then you would need the cellular version of the iPad (rather than the Wi-Fi only one) and a mobile data plan.

The Web Application

You use the web application to manage your inventory, customers and sales people. The initial data is uploaded from your on-premise ERP system, but there is some additional data that you would want to add to make this a better experience. Further this is a good portal to get information on how your sales are going and how your sales people are doing.

Below is a screen shot of the inventory list screen:

From here you click on an inventory item to get more detailed information:

Here you do things like setup related items or add the item to a category (which makes browsing them on the iPad much quicker). You can also add more photos for the item. Generally these should be produced professionally and not just taken with your iPad camera.

For the Team, tab you can manage your sales team, set quotas and see how your sales people are performing against their quotas.

Connected to ERP

Like the other two mobile/web applications I blogged about, this one uses the Sage Data Cloud and will work with any ERP that is connected to this cloud. Currently that is Sage 100 ERP and Sage 300 ERP with Sage 50 ERP (Canadian and US) following shortly.

If you were to use all three of these application, you would still only use one connector which would synchronize ERP data to and from the Sage Data Cloud and would share common items like the customer master file.

Credit card processing is via Sage Payment Services so again everything here is synchronized between the ERP, Sage Payment’s virtual terminal and the Sage Data Cloud.

Summary

This iPad native application is a great way to enable a mobile sales team to interact with customer and build quotes and orders. It has many ease of use features that iPad users expect and fully integrates with your current Sage on-premise ERP system.

Sage Summit is our annual North American partner and customer conference. This year it was held at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington, DC. Sage rolled out many exciting new products, upgrades and services. As a blogger I’m glad that they’ve all now been announced since these will provide articles for months to come and I don’t have to hold back waiting for Sage Summit anymore. Most of the topics mentioned here quickly will be the topic for future much more detailed blog postings.

Keynotes

Pascal Houillon kicked off the opening keynote comparing the Sage journey to mountain climbing. Talking about teamwork and overcoming very daunting obstacles. There was also a lot of mention on progress with building the Sage brand in North America.

Included in the keynote were demos of some of Sage’s new mobile applications, showing people buying things from iPads, being dispatched to perform service work from their iPhone and entering construction time card data on an Android tablet. The best demo was Steve Malmgren demoing voice input on a Windows phone where he could just ask general questions with vague input data and get back meaningful answers. He could ask questions like “What’s the address of American in Milwaukee?” and get back the full company name, its address and go to a map to get directions. It was very impressive and the voice recognition worked really well considering the noisy conditions up on stage.

Then the keynotes broke out into several super-sessions. I attended the super-session on technology which was standing room only. This session outlined all our new technology initiatives and all the things that we were delivering now. These included several mobile native applications along with the announcement of the new Sage 300 Online. A lot of time was invested in explaining how the provisioning and signup processes worked and how ISVs can participate in the new Sage Data Cloud that is the backbone for all the new services.

Sage Mobile Applications

We previewed rough prototypes of a number of mobile applications at last year’s Sage Summit conference. This year we are releasing the real things. The first three mobile applications are Sage Mobile Sales, Sage Billing and Payment and Sage Mobile Service.

Sage Mobile Sales is an iPad native application for sales people, Sage Mobile Service is an iPhone native application for receiving service calls. Sage Billing and Payment is a web application for chasing down people who owe you money. All of these take credit cards for payment via Sage Payment Solutions.

Below are some screen shots to give a flavor of what they look like.

Sage Data Cloud

All these Sage Mobile Applications are connected to the Sage Data Cloud. All the data required for these applications to run, as well as all the transactions they generate go through the Sage Data Cloud. The Sage Data Cloud is hosted in Microsoft Azure and is connected to your on-premise ERP system. Your on-premise ERP uploads to data to the cloud like customer and inventory information and then downloads transactions like orders and invoices. It is the glue that connects your on-premise ERP with the cloud world without requiring you to run a web server or any other special infrastructure.

Currently we have connectors to the Sage Data Cloud for Sage 100 ERP and Sage 300 ERP. With connectors to Sage 50 ERP (US and Canadian) to be available shortly.

Sage 300 Online

Sage 300 Online is our new cloud version. This runs Sage 300 ERP 2014 in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It is integrated with SageID and uses new virtualization technology to being an improved application experience.

The following is the web page that you would launch the Sage 300 ERP 2014 Desktop from or transfer data to/from the cloud.

Sage 300 ERP 2014

Sage 300 ERP 2014 is our new version that will be shipping in a couple of months. This version includes many user interface improvements in the main Desktop along with throughout many application screens. There is much more information on what people are doing in the system, improved visual process flows and a number of other improvements that people have been asking for.

Sage City

We introduced Sage City last year and have continued it this year due to popular demand. Sage City includes a keynote address for the Sage Customers, it then breaks up into networking/problem solving sessions where like-minded customers get together to jointly solve their problems.

Sage Marketplace Live Expo

Every year there is an exhibition hall which has booths representing all our main ISV partners. All the Sage business applications act as both a platform and a center for a whole ecosystem of products and services. These products range from small but useful utilities all the way up to major applications and all have the goal of seamlessly integrating with various Sage products. Many lunches, breakfasts and dinners were served here so that partners and customers could eat as well as have plenty of time to investigate all the various products that could make their lives easier.

Social Media

Like any conference, one of the goals is to promote the company and to generate coverage in the press. Besides getting articles written for various publications (mostly online), part of it is generating interest in the social media like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. Seeing all the tweets by industry analysts as well as judging sentiment from the attendees by watching the twitter feeds. You can see this by searching for the hashtag #SageSummit. Often the twitter feeds were displayed on large screens for all to see. Plus Twitter is a great way of people to connect and exchange information. There was also a Sage Summit conference mobile application to show the conference agenda as well as allow people to connect and use social media. Plus points were awarded for using the app where people were competing for a prize.

Summary

Sage Summit 2013 was another enjoyable conference. It was a great opportunity to meet many partners and customers. To see all the great products our ISV community are working on. To see some products and people from other parts of Sage that I don’t normally interact with. Next year Sage Summit is in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay on July 27-August 1, 2014.

When SDK applications are launched from the Desktop, they are passed an object handle that they can use to create a session that exactly matches the session of the desktop that launched them. Further the desktop can manage these programs and for instance put up an error message if you try to close the Desktop while they are still running.

Quite a few people create programs that aren’t written using our SDK, but still are tightly integrated to Sage 300 ERP via one of our APIs such as the COM API, .Net API or Java API. You can add arbitrary EXE programs to the Desktop as icons and launch them just like any other screen.

When we designed the current UI framework, we had the intention that our UIs could be run from many places, such as VBA macros or hosted inside Internet Explorer. We also envisioned them being strung together in workflow type applications. Towards this we created the Session Manager and the Signon Manager to help tie together programs running inside the desktop with programs running outside the desktop. For information on using the Session Manager, check out this blog posting.

Generally this has worked quite well. Especially if you only signon to one company, then all the various things running will share the same session and you won’t have to signon to everything separately. However there are a few limitations to our current approach. If there are two desktops running (usually signed on to different companies) then when the external program is run, it has to present a dialog to choose which company’s session to use. This makes sense if you say start an EXE program from the start menu, since how would it know which desktop session to use? But when you run from the desktop you would expect it to just use that desktop’s session, rather than being treated like it wasn’t run from the desktop. Similarly if you started an EXE program from the desktop you would expect the Desktop to prevent closing until this program is closed, right now this check is only for SDK programs run from the desktop and doesn’t apply to anything else.

A lot of people are creating standalone EXE’s that use our APIs and they are using the Session Manager, which generally works well, but would like to get the other cases handled as nicely. So for the upcoming Sage 300 ERP 2014 release we have added some support to the Desktop to help with this. To basically allow non-SDK programs to start with the same protocol as the SDK programs so they can behave in the same manner. The alpha (developer) early release of Sage 300 ERP 2014 is available to ISVs so you can try this out now.

New Macro Substitution

If you add a program to a groupfile or if you add a program via file new in the desktop, if you specify $objecthandle$ as an argument, then this will be translated into an object handle when you are run that you can use in other API calls to get a session that matches your desktop. For instance in a group file:

This is then the token you can use to create your session exactly from the Desktop that ran you.

If you aren’t an SDK program, you probably don’t have your own group file. However you can use a couple of SDK tools to add your item to an existing group file. The program unccgrp.exe (usually installed in c:\pluswdev\bin) will de-compile a group file (these are usually grp.dat files in a programs language folder, like ar62a\eng\grp.dat). Then you can add your own entries to this and then use ccgrp.exe to re-compile the group file. This is a bit of a kludge because it may overwritten by Product Updates and two people trying to do this at once may collide and interfere with each other. But it can be an effective and useful technique.

How to Use the Object Handle

You can then pass the object handle into a session init call and your session will be configured to match the desktop you are run from. Additionally if you want to register your windows handle, you can use the roto api to do so given the object handle. You should also clear this when you terminate.

Below is a VB program which does these things. It uses the session it gets to display the company name in a label. This way it will be connected to the right Desktop and the Desktop knows when it’s running.

Last year at Sage Summit in Nashville we tried an experiment in social networking that we called Sage City. I mentioned this in my blog on Sage Summit 2012 here. Sage City in Nashville was a huge success and we will be building on that for an even better Sage City event at this year’s Sage Summit conference in Washington, DC.

Last week we opened the online version of Sage City. The intent is to build a social networking super-site for all Sage customers, partners and employees.

History

There has always been a lot of social networking around Sage and its products. Typically each product group or division operated its own set of forums and blogs. This is then hard for customers who use several products like say Sage CRM and Sage ERP. They need to join several disparate communities, which are all quite different.

The external groups are doing great and will continue to do so. But something needed to be done about all the internal groups. Many were running different software platforms, used different sign-on ids, looked quite different, and had different policies and so on.

Unify the Sage Social Sites

The first goal of Sage City was to unify all these different Sage social communities into one place. Basically a Sage customer now only needs to sign up for Sage City and then they can join discussions on many Sage products as well as reference all sorts of other on-line resources. Now all the Sage forums are using the same software, they all work the same way and they will all be updated and maintained together providing a unified experience. Below is just the start of quite long list of support communities available on Sage City:

Notice that we now have both unified customer communities as well as unified partner communities.

You might ask: What about all the great content in all the previous discussion forums and blogs? The Sage City team did a great job of bringing all this content over to the new site. This isn’t an empty site waiting to be filled, there are already hundreds of blog postings and thousands of discussion forum threads imported from the older sites. This provides a great resource of information that has already been captured.

Business Communities

If you attended Sage Summit last year, you know that Sage City wasn’t organized around products, it was organized around business interests. Now that we’ve brought together all the different product social sites into one place, this now gives us a great opportunity to build on this new greater expanded community.

Across all the different Sage business products there is a lot of commonality in professional function. For instance there are many Accountants using Sage ERP products. Sage City offers social sites for all of these. In the screen shot below is the start of the list of the various business communities that are available on Sage City:

The key to their success is that these communities are large enough to be vibrant and self-sustaining. By bringing together the larger Sage community we can achieve this.

Most business issues and problems don’t have anything to do with ERP or CRM software and these new forums offer a great opportunity to discuss these with knowledgeable peers in a community of like minded people.

A True Social Site

Besides unifying all our various discussion forums and blogs, the new Sage City site also offers many of the expected social features that you would expect on any modern Social Media site. You can have friends, follow people, like things, join groups, send messages, mark favorites, subscribe to RSS feeds, and post comments and replies.

The site is integrated with Twitter feeds and with Sage’s product idea site.

There are discussion forums, blogs and videos. There are feeds showing all the activities going on either on the whole site or just in a specific group.

A Platform to Build On

Last week was the initial launch, but we have a large enthusiastic team that continues to work on Sage City, so you can expect to see regular updates and enhancements to make this a continually growing and more and more vibrant site.

The first goal is to attract as many people as possible to the site. The strength and value of a community is built on the enthusiasm of the individual participants. A strong community is a powerful thing. Hopefully by bringing together all the customers, partners and employees from separate Sage product camps we can build a much more valuable community than we could acting separately.

Summary

Sage City is now live. Sage City is so new the Google Spiders haven’t even cataloged its contents yet. But I think Sage City is a great improvement over Sage’s separate product social site. There are already lots of active users and discussions. I’ll be contributing regularly and I hope to see you there as well.